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I currently have Wednesdays free to get some of my own artwork done and i’m really enjoying the chance to spend a whole day developing new ideas and working on different projects! I’m still trying to get down to the John Jarrold Printing Museum on Wednesday mornings and am beginning to get my head around type setting!

Below are some pics of a poem I have been setting up… as you’ll see there are some ‘u’s and ‘n’s in the wrong places, this could be because someone put the ‘sorts’ in the wrong place, or more likely I was struggling to read upside down and back to front!

At the workshop, I also took a proof of ‘Grandma’ to see if the soft ground shows when printed. I taught a session on Monday with the intaglio beginners group using a new batch of soft ground solution (copper sulphate) but have resolved that the mix was a tad too weak so I will be testing this again tomorrow to ensure I get better results for the learners. When etching a hard ground the copper sulphate or acid needs to be stronger so that the lines are etched down into the plate and hold enough ink to print a clear line. There needs to be a weaker solution for soft ground as it can dissolve and break down too quickly, especially if a texture has been used to remove a lot of surface area. However, I do need to make the solution slightly stronger because as you can see by the print below, after 6 minutes it is still quite a light etch. (There are several factors such as time, room temperature, solution, plate type and ground that can affect this!)

I am pleased with how this etching has printed so far, particularly some of the free lines, but I want to draw into it more and work into the background to give it more depth…

I also proofed and actually started editioning the ‘rocker’ print as part of the tools of the trade project! It’s a mixture of etching, mezzotint, collagraph and as it turned out, a bit of chine colle! I had a really clear idea of how this might work in my head and i’m really excited about the result as I’ve been meaning to try combining methods in this way and think it will work really well in future work!